WILKES-BARRE - Prosecutors, still stinging from the sudden dismissal of their case last month, worked aggressively Friday to ensure Cody Lee's second preliminary hearing ended with the Lake Twp. teen back in jail and awaiting trial for allegedly gunning down his great-grandfather in December 2009.

A classmate, who did not testify at the failed preliminary hearing last month, said Mr. Lee showed him detailed plans in a notebook for killing Herbert Lee hours before prosecutors said the boy fired a single .222-caliber bullet through the 80-year-old's brain.

"He said he probably wasn't going to be around long," the classmate, Cody Fox, said of his conversation with Mr. Lee in the cafeteria at Lake-Lehman High School. "I asked why. He told me he was going to kill his grandfather. I didn't really believe him."

Mr. Lee's father, Scott, testified he arrived home shortly after the shooting and found his son hiding behind a bathroom door, pointing the muzzle of a rifle into the hallway.

Another relative, Robert E. Lee, dispelled a defense argument that the shooting may have been an accident, saying the rifle, kept by Herbert Lee in a locked gun cabinet, never fired by mistake in the 15 to 20 times he used it to hunt.

The strategy worked.

After three hours of testimony Friday, Magisterial District Judge Paul Roberts Jr. - sitting in place of the judge who dismissed the original charge, James E. Tupper - ruled prosecutors had met a fundamental threshold of evidence to send Mr. Lee to trial in Luzerne County Court on an open count of homicide.

Judge Roberts ordered Mr. Lee handcuffed and returned to the Luzerne County Correctional Facility. A trial date has not been scheduled. Under state law, homicide defendants are not allowed to post bail.

Under a previous ruling, the now 19-year-old Mr. Lee will be tried as an adult. If convicted of first-degree murder, he could face a mandatory life sentence. Prosecutors have not made a final determination on seeking the death penalty, but First Assistant District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said it did not seem likely.

After the hearing, defense attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. reiterated his allegation of "prosecutorial misconduct" against the authorities he said "illegally" charged Mr. Lee for a second time. He also pledged to challenge the legality of the search that led to the notebook, saying it was "100 percent unconstitutional."

"The notes and the backpack will all be suppressed and then we'll see where the case goes from there," Mr. Olszewski told reporters after the hearing.

"Either he has forgotten the law on prosecutorial misconduct or else he is deliberately trying to mislead the public and the court," Mr. Sanguedolce said. "These investigators, to accuse them of prosecutorial misconduct, or this legal team, is preposterous. They did everything they were supposed to do."

State police rearrested Mr. Lee in Judge Tupper's Trucksville courtroom Jan. 11, seconds after the judge dismissed the homicide charge that had been in place for three years.

Battered by the rare defeat - magistrates almost always forward cases onto the trial court - prosecutors retooled their presentation with more testimony from live witnesses and the full contents of Mr. Lee's spiral-bound notebook.

At the initial preliminary hearing last month, prosecutors presented Judge Tupper with copies of the relevant pages from the notebook and relied on hearsay testimony, which is permissible in that forum, to save Scott Lee from the burden of testifying.

"It's very trying to be on the stand and be cross-examined and to have to testify against your son," Mr. Sanguedolce said. "We tried to avoid that the first time. It couldn't be avoided (this time), so we put him on the stand this time and he, in fact, gave the testimony as we expected."

Contact the writer: msisak@citizensvoice.com, @cvmikesisak on Twitter

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